01 May 2009

"I'm Hugely dissatisfied," says Lawrence Waterman, cheerfully,  when asked about safety management on the 2012 project.

And the Olympic Delivery Authority's (ODA's) head of safety can afford to be cheerful, because the project is setting new standards in construction safety and, in the 12 months since HSW last talked to him about risk management on the Olympics (see Road to the games), has cut its accident rates below what were already creditable levels.

But the dissatisfaction is not a pose. He knows that demanding that the contractors in charge of building the massive venues, landscaping and providing services to the park create the lowest-risk environment possible is the best insurance against avoiding the fatalities and major accidents that have been an unfortunate side effect of the time pressure and scale of all previous Olympic projects.

So when Waterman, noting that the mud control and housekeeping isn't perfect across the site, says he thinks you ought to be able to "drop a sandwich on a haul road and pick it up and eat it," you feel he not only means it, but that it's a statement of intent for risk management of the whole project.

Scaled up

The biggest challenge, he says, comes from the change in scale. This time last year, there were 3000 workers on site; now there are 4500 and they are beginning to sweat the Olympic park's infrastructure.

"We're not opening up substantial new entry plazas or doubling the number of haul roads," he explains, "so there are some facilities like the road network which, as we increase in numbers, will begin to move towards some sort of capacity. The frustrations among people when a roadwork is running at capacity and logistics are under pressure can result in people speeding as soon as they are away from a bit of a log-jam."

With so many groundworkers moving around the site, the risk of people being struck by vehicles - the third most common cause of UK construction fatalities - is high. The ODA's answer has been to set a 15 mile-an-hour speed limit.

Its delivery partner, CLM (a consortium comprising US programme managers CH2M Hill, Laing O'Rourke and Mace), and the highways contractor McNicholas have deployed traffic marshals at busy junctions across the site. As well as guiding traffic and trying to reduce snarl-ups, the marshals have the power to impose "traffic enforcement notices", or TENs, to drivers they see breaking the speed limit, using mobile phones, crossing red signals, not wearing seatbelts or otherwise behaving recklessly.

"The TENs are issued to the individual driver and to their employer," says Waterman. "What we say to the employer is you can choose to do what you want but when three of these notices are issued we'd like to know what you are doing in response with that driver."

Most contractors, he says, are handing drivers their cards when they notch up three notices, or at least giving them final written warnings. He realises the set-up could sound draconian but comes back to the issue of setting the highest standards: "These are not public roads, but we are saying the nature of the risks on the Olympic park site mean we want you to drive even more carefully than you would drive on a public road."

The TENs issued to each contractor are also published monthly in a league table, so it's obvious which of the first tier contractors' supply chains has most strikes, promoting an extra level of pressure on the lower tiers to improve.

Shock of the new

Apart from the pressure on facilities such as the road network, the rapid ramping up of worker numbers has a more nebulous impact; it risks weakening the strong safety ethos the ODA and contractors have built up in the workforce.

"As you ramp up numbers you have to work harder to maintain the safety culture," Waterman says. "When you have relatively few workers on site and you are working with them closely and arguing with them about the Olympic site being different, the few new workers that come in week by week don't have a great diluting effect on that.

"When very large numbers are coming in you are at risk of people bringing with them, not bad habits, but it would take them a while to become Olympic 'parkised', to go with the flow of the culture that we've been developing on the park that says health and safety is a priority and if you can't do it safely we'd rather you stopped the job, and that everyone's got the right to stop working if they don't feel safe. So we put a lot of effort into communicating that."

The games' looming and unmoveable deadline means there's no slowing the influx, so the only option is to work hard on reinforcing the safety culture through poster campaigns, frequent site briefings, safety stand-downs and articles in Parklife, the monthly newspaper.

Another inevitable risk category the ODA and its construction contractors face as the "big build" phase gets underway (see 'Work in progress' below) is work at height. "We are coming out of the ground now," says Waterman, adding that it's not just falls they have to think about but the hazards posed by the size and weight of many of the structural elements for some erections, which will be unlike those many of the workers will have built before.

Here he is able to offer a good example of another item on the ODA's menu of construction best practice: designing out risk. In last year's article, he and head of occupational health at the site Chris Pugh talked about sidestepping the need for hazardous activities such as post-drilling and formwork, through good design and offsite fabrication.

Now he points to the fact that ISG, principal contractors for the velodrome, have worked with architects Hopkins and Partners to re-engineer a design which originally required some 900 tonnes of steelwork bolted together in a lattice to hold up the elliptical timber and aluminium-clad roof, which has been compared prosaically to a giant Pringle crisp. ISG's buildability team managed to substitute 100 tonnes of cable for the steelwork, to be assembled at ground level, cutting hundreds of hours of work at height while following the original design aesthetic. "From a sustainability point of view, we are also saving 700 to 800 tonnes of steel," Waterman notes.

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Work in progress

The groundworks, site remediation and planning phase of the 2012 project, known as "dig, demolish, design", is now nearly over at the 246-hectare Olympic park in East London. This platform stage involved processing 500,000 tonnes of soil to remove contaminants left by the park's previous industrial uses, demolishing all but a couple of the 220 former buildings on the site, and laying 200km of power cables in two 6km tunnels under the site, allowing 52 pylons to be dismantled.

The first of two energy centres, complete with Biomass boilers and a combined cooling, heat and power plant, which will help power the games, is almost complete in the west of the park.

The 4000 25m piles for the foundations of the stadium have been sunk and around 800,000 tonnes of soil excavated to create the bowl which will house the lower tier seating and the games space. Principal contractors Sir Robert McAlpine are now putting up the A-frame steel sections that will support the roof and the temporary 55,000-seater upper tier.

The piling is complete on the Aquatics Centre designed by Zaha Hadid, and contractors Balfour Beatty have started erecting the roof supports. Planning permission has been granted for all the other major venues and Carillion has begun piling for the broadcast and press centre, as have ISG InteriorExterior, lead contractors on the 6000-capacity velodrome.

The first of the 30 bridges that will span the watercourses and railtracks that cut through the site is in place and work has begun on several more. The 2.6km Docklands Light Railway extension to serve the park is already open and extra carriages have been delivered to extend the trains; work is under way to increase the capacity of the London tube's Jubilee Line.

Overall, says Waterman, the ODA and its delivery partner CLM are on course to meet the set of milestones in July which were set after the end of the Beijing Olympiad.

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Righteous paths

Waterman says there is no shortage of examples of best practice in risk management measures out on the park. He notes that on the aquatics centre site, the contractors have laid temporary concrete pathways for the workers, to cut slips and trips. "That's unheard of in construction. People twist their ankles all the time walking on uneven ground," he says.

Another instance is the plastic caps that contractors are fitting to the ends of the steel rebar which strengthens the reinforced concrete, so the ends cannot do as much damage if they strike anyone.

In shallow excavations without shored sides, he says, the standard procedure is to have a wobbly ladder for workers to climb out, but in some parts of the park they are now using self-levelling steps that brace themselves against the excavation wall and even provide a handrail, allowing whole groups of workers to climb in and out safely and quickly.

He believes that these measures pay for themselves in increased efficiency. "For the sake of a few pounds you've got a piece of equipment that results in that team of people working more efficiently. It's investing in productivity; it's often the case that buildability and health and safety go hand in glove. It's one of the reasons I never have to work to build a business case with my directors, because they already know that whatever we do for health and safety is de-risking the project - making it more likely we'll deliver on time and on budget."

Though the ODA is making the cost/benefit case to the contractors for best practice controls, it also makes clear to them that these standards are just what is expected while they are on the park. "All the time the ODA is trying to create a context in which it is possible for the individual contractors to be excellent," he says. "And there's also a bit of assurance, 'biting the bum', at the end where we say we will come and check on you and see how well or badly you are doing."

The biting comes in the monthly scorecards the principal contractors and CDM coordinators have to complete showing their performance against safety performance indicators, and in the work of the ODA's own assurance team who make planned, though not always announced, inspection visits to every part of the park on a rolling programme.

The team has now developed a set of visual standards which are also issued to the contractors and against which the state of any part of the site is judged. Examples of good practice on any project are quickly built into this standard, so those concrete paths on the aquatics site have now been incorporated in picture form, along with their antithesis, a bumpy path to a welfare cabin, and any contractor making workers cross slippery, uneven ground will be marked down.

"My experience is that our construction firms, fairly typically, are up for what we are asking them to do, which is to deliver the best performance that has ever been delivered on a construction project in the UK," says Waterman. "Which they are doing."

Fine figures

Olympic projects across the globe have an unenviable history for accident rates. So how is the 2012 project faring? In almost four years, there have been 22 accidents recorded under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR) which required the workers involved to take three or more days off work.

The rolling 12-month accident frequency rate (AFR) across the park - RIDDORs per 100,000 hours worked - is currently 0.11, down slightly from 0.12 when we looked at the project this time last year, and almost a quarter of the estimated construction industry average of around 0.4. The overall rate for the whole project - those 22 RIDDORs multiplied by the 100,000 and divided by the total hours worked since November 2005 - is only slightly higher at 0.15.

The site went a few days over two million hours without an accident in 2008 and has passed the million hour accident-free marker seven times since the project began.

For Waterman, the moral satisfaction of injuring as few people as possible during the project is accompanied by a zeal to show the business justification of the approach. "If we were delivering the average accident rate for our industry on the Olympic park, every one of our Tier 1 contractors would be investigating one or two RIDDORs a month," he notes. "Instead they can spend the same amount of time looking at ways to improve production."

He says one of his tasks over the next couple of years will be proving to the industry that money and time spent on "de-risking" to the 2012 levels more than pays for itself during the project, and not just on major projects like his own. He believes that if they can be convinced of the business case, the contractors will be more likely to take it on for themselves and make it business as usual, regardless of client or economic pressures. "We have to help them think beyond the recession," he says, "to what will make the industry competitive and sustainable in future."

He says the ODA's major contractors have embraced the challenge to make safety performance on the site the best on any UK construction project. "I don't think we are putting them under untoward pressure," he says, "but it may not always feel that way."

Ron Cameron, safety manager for Balfour Beatty Civil Engineering, Major Projects, the Tier 1 contractor for roads and bridges and the aquatics centre, says the pressure is welcome because it is pushing the company to meet its own separate target of zero accidents by (coincidentally) 2012.

He says the ODA's drive for best practice has inspired innovations such as the concrete paths, trialling special scaffolding attachments which provide instant mid and top rails, and cutting the rebar used in the piling works with hydraulic tools, which removed the need for fuel, sparks and the fire risk that comes with them. The level of scrutiny, notes Cameron, both from ODA's auditors and from visitors to the site, "makes you focus every day. You don't know who will be around your project."

Praise be

Though Waterman believes this low-to-zero tolerance of defaults, and his "huge dissatisfaction" with the status quo, helps keep everyone on their toes, he also knows that the stick has to be balanced by the carrot. So there is plenty of positive reinforcement for safe behaviour. "There's monthly awards, worker of the week, here's a breakfast voucher because you're wearing the right PPE, all that is being done on the park," he says.

Most of this is organised by the contractors themselves; the ODA's special contribution is a health, safety and environment awards evening it is organising in July at a town hall near the site. The awards, sponsored by IOSH, the IIRSM and the British Safety Council, will recognise the workers and teams, nominated by colleagues, who have done most to reduce risk, learnt from incidents and shown no tolerance of unsafe conditions.

"In a recession we don't want a glitzy do," says Waterman. "It will be casual dress and we'll have a ceilidh band or something similar; it should be a good night."

He describes the awards as the "capping layer" of the activities to reward safety improvements. So far this two-pronged approach by the ODA as concerned client - pushing the contractors to meet the highest standards then providing the mortar between the blocks of their safety initiatives - has paid dividends. In the next 12 months as construction starts in earnest on the 2012 venues, and the workforce burgeons, the model will face greater tests.

In spring 2010 HSW will report again on progress towards the London Olympics.

Categories:
Construction, Safety, Article



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